Opis ebooka Venus in Furs - Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Severin is so infatuated with Wanda that he requests to be treated as her slave and encourages her to treat him in progressively more degrading ways. At first Wanda does not want to, but later embraces the idea; though at the same time, she disdains Severin for allowing her to do so. Severin describes his feelings during these experiences as suprasensuality. Wanda treats him brutally as a servant, and recruits a trio of African women to dominate him. The relationship arrives at a crisis point when Wanda herself meets a man to whom she would like to submit. Severin, humiliated by Wanda's new lover, ceases to desire to submit, stating that men should dominate women until the time when women are equal to men in education and rights. Probably the first book which blatantly addresses the issue of female sexual domination, this is today a classic of the genre and it is the author from whom the word masochism takes its name.

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"But the Almighty Lord hath struck him,

and hath delivered him into the hands of

a woman."

—The Vulgate, Judith, xvi. 7.

Introduction

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in Lemberg, Austrian Galicia,
on January 27, 1836. He studied jurisprudence at Prague and Graz,
and in 1857 became a teacher at the latter university. He published
several historical works, but soon gave up his academic career to
devote himself wholly to literature. For a number of years he
edited the international review, Auf der Hohe, at Leipzig, but
later removed to Paris, for he was always strongly Francophile. His
last years he spent at Lindheim in Hesse, Germany, where he died on
March 9, 1895. In 1873 he married Aurora von Rumelin, who wrote a
number of novels under the pseudonym of Wanda von Dunajew, which it
is interesting to note is the name of the heroine of Venus in Furs.
Her sensational memoirs which have been the cause of considerable
controversy were published in 1906.

During his career as writer an endless number of works poured
from Sacher-Masoch's pen. Many of these were works of ephemeral
journalism, and some of them unfortunately pure sensationalism, for
economic necessity forced him to turn his pen to unworthy ends.

There is, however, a residue among his works which has a
distinct literary and even greater psychological value. His
principal literary ambition was never completely fulfilled. It was
a somewhat programmatic plan to give a picture of contemporary life
in all its various aspects and interrelations under the general
title of the Heritage of Cain. This idea was probably derived from
Balzac's Comedie Humaine. The whole was to be divided into six
subdivisions with the general titles Love, Property, Money, The
State, War, and Death. Each of these divisions in its turn
consisted of six novels, of which the last was intended to
summarize the author's conclusions and to present his solution for
the problems set in the others.

This extensive plan remained unachieved, and only the first two
parts, Love and Property, were completed. Of the other sections
only fragments remain. The present novel, Venus in Furs, forms the
fifth in the series, Love.

The best of Sacher-Masoch's work is characterized by a swift
narration and a graphic representation of character and scene and a
rich humor. The latter has made many of his shorter stories dealing
with his native Galicia little masterpieces of local color.

There is, however, another element in his work which has caused
his name to become as eponym for an entire series of phenomena at
one end of the psycho-sexual scale. This gives his productions a
peculiar psychological value, though it cannot be denied also a
morbid tinge that makes them often repellent. However, it is well
to remember that nature is neither good nor bad, neither altruistic
nor egoistic, and that it operates through the human psyche as well
as through crystals and plants and animals with the same inexorable
laws.

Sacher-Masoch was the poet of the anomaly now generally known as
masochism. By this is meant the desire on the part of the
individual affected of desiring himself completely and
unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite
sex, and being treated by this person as by a master, to be
humiliated, abused, and tormented, even to the verge of death. This
motive is treated in all its innumerable variations. As a creative
artist Sacher-Masoch was, of course, on the quest for the absolute,
and sometimes, when impulses in the human being assume an abnormal
or exaggerated form, there is just for a moment a flash that gives
a glimpse of the thing in itself.

If any defense were needed for the publication of work like
Sacher-Masoch's it is well to remember that artists are the
historians of the human soul and one might recall the wise and
tolerant Montaigne's essay On the Duty of Historians where he says,
"One may cover over secret actions, but to be silent on what all
the world knows, and things which have had effects which are public
and of so much consequence is an inexcusable defect."

And the curious interrelation between cruelty and sex, again and
again, creeps into literature. Sacher-Masoch has not created
anything new in this. He has simply taken an ancient motive and
developed it frankly and consciously, until, it seems, there is
nothing further to say on the subject. To the violent attacks which
his books met he replied in a polemical work, Über den Wert der
Kritik.

It would be interesting to trace the masochistic tendency as it
occurs throughout literature, but no more can be done than just to
allude to a few instances. The theme recurs continually in the
Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau; it explains the character of
the chevalier in Prevost's Manon l'Escault. Scenes of this nature
are found in Zola's Nana, in Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved, in
Albert Juhelle's Les Pecheurs d'Hommes, in Dostojevski. In
disguised and unrecognized form it constitutes the undercurrent of
much of the sentimental literature of the present day, though in
most cases the authors as well as the readers are unaware of the
pathological elements out of which their characters are built.

In all these strange and troubled waters of the human spirit one
might wish for something of the serene and simple attitude of the
ancient world. Laurent Tailhade has an admirable passage in his
Platres et Marbres, which is well worth reproducing in this
connection:

Among Sacher-Masoch's works, Venus in Furs is one of the most
typical and outstanding. In spite of melodramatic elements and
other literary faults, it is unquestionably a sincere work, written
without any idea of titillating morbid fancies. One feels that in
the hero many subjective elements have been incorporated, which are
a disadvantage to the work from the point of view of literature,
but on the other hand raise the book beyond the sphere of art, pure
and simple, and make it one of those appalling human documents
which belong, part to science and part to psychology. It is the
confession of a deeply unhappy man who could not master his
personal tragedy of existence, and so sought to unburden his soul
in writing down the things he felt and experienced. The reader who
will approach the book from this angle and who will honestly put
aside moral prejudices and prepossessions will come away from the
perusal of this book with a deeper understanding of this poor
miserable soul of ours and a light will be cast into dark places
that lie latent in all of us.

Sacher-Masoch's works have held an established position in
European letters for something like half a century, and the author
himself was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French
Government in 1883, on the occasion of his literary jubilee. When
several years ago cheap reprints were brought out on the Continent
and attempts were made by various guardians of morality—they exist
in all countries— to have them suppressed, the judicial decisions
were invariably against the plaintiff and in favor of the
publisher. Are Americans children that they must be protected from
books which any European school-boy can purchase whenever he
wishes? However, such seems to be the case, and this translation,
which has long been in preparation, consequently appears in a
limited edition printed for subscribers only. In another connection
Herbert Spencer once used these words: "The ultimate result of
shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with
fools." They have a very pointed application in the case of a work
like Venus in Furs.